The print-quality design aims for this machine have been well realised. By adding in the red and green inks, Canon has produced a machine that gives very natural colouring for both landscapes and portraits. There is little noticeable hue shift in any of the prints we produced, compared with the original colours.
Big and square and bordering on ugly
Detail levels are very good and the machine succeeds in reproducing detail from shadows well. In some printers these dark shades veer to black, giving muddy detail and reducing the overall fidelity. The one problem we did notice was on one of our A3 prints, where there was a hint of banding in a particularly blue area of the sky.
With eight inks to keep topped up, you’d perhaps expect this to be an expensive printer to run. However the photo colours and red and green are used primarily to tweak the main tints and should yield thousands of pages each. Even so, using Canon's yield figures for 15 x 10cm photos, produced a cost of 20p per print, which is on the high side, even when compared with other Canon printers.
Verdict
If you need to print photos larger than A4, the choice comes down to Canon, Epson or HP. Their A3 and A3+ models produce good, multiple-ink colour images, but the accurate colours and fast print speeds of the Pixma Pro9000 Mk II must put it well up the shortlist. ®
More Printer Reviews...
Brother MFC-5890CN |
Kyocera FS-C5200DN |
Lexmark C543DN |
Epson Stylus Photo PX800FW |
Canon Pixma Pro9000 Mark II
COMMENTS
Still Uses Pigment Ink
You didn't make any mention of the type of ink this printer uses. It still uses dye ink, which is susceptible to fading from exposure to ozone and is not water proof. The state of the art in ink technology is pigment ink. The PIXMA Pro9500 Mark II features a pigment ink set and would be a much better choice for serious photographers.
Missed a bit
You didn't mention (or I didn't notice it) anything about the 16-bit rather than 8-bit printing this device is capable of which will give better tone rendition. DSLRs are generally 14-bit so there's a fair bit being downsampled/lost to print in 8-bit
It’s a peculiar truth that
>It’s a peculiar truth that, as inkjet printers go upmarket, they’re provided with fewer bells and whistles.
I'm all for that and I'd be happier with this printer if it didn't do CDs nor had PictBridge. Anybody who buys this will be solely interested in it as a dedicated medium format photo printer. As far as I'm concerned the unnecessary bells and whistles just add complexity and are another thing that might go wrong.
I wish manufacturers would learn that more isn't always better.
CISS
My Pixma IP1500 is still going strong gets lugged around dogs shows, is god awful cheap to
refill and can be CISS'd quite easily. For a A3+ machine Canon used to be the only game
in town as others Epson et.al required hardware hacks to enable a CISS system to defeat the
cart chips. Canon were the only manuf at the time who did nto chip carts.
Now they have jointhe the unrefillable bandwagon and have included features on their latest
printers to ensure exisiting CISS systems will no longer work.
IMHO a large printer like with without (the possibility of) a CISS is simply not cost effective.
